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    • Spotify Lossless isn’t quite as lossless as the other lossless offerings. I won’t bore you with the details, they are very dull, but Spotify Connect Lossless should be alright.

            • Your Wiim pro also supports Tidal Connect and Qobuz Connect. Tidal is cheaper than Spotify per month. Qobuz can also be more cost effective but only if you pay for a yearly subscription.

              • Sadly @pencilsqueezer the family sub on Spotify is massively used by all moles. I also do use the audiobooks on the commute. Thus preventing any switching on quality/ethics grounds. Son will also not hear about switching off Netflix as he’s working his way through gossip girl (🙄)

                • Fair enough. I never have any issue with switching as I’m the sole subscriber and I don’t make playlists so moving around has always been eminently doable. I’m happy with Qobuz though so I’ll stick with them for the foreseeable.

                  • I discovered recently that my Spotify playlists could be migrated to Qobuz. A laborious process, mind, using a 3rd-party online app, one playlist at a time.
                    A few tracks here and there were lost because they weren’t available on Qobuz. Not a big deal for me.

              • My (admitedly cursory) look at tidal suggests that it only allows monthly payments. If you chose to pay for a year of Spotify, then it’s cheaper than Tidal. I’ve just paid about £115 for a year of Spotify.

                • I stand corrected John. Spotify is cheaper than either if one stumps up for a yearly subscription. I won’t be signing up though. I tried Spotify some time ago and couldn’t get along with it for a variety of reasons. I’ll be sticking with Qobuz for the foreseeable.

              • The Wiim Pro (Xmas present for – cough – the whole family) is a fantastic piece of kit @pencilsqueezer, putting Spotify, Amazon Music, Soundcloud etc. and BBC radio onto my very much analogue JBL Control Ones (you can still buy a pair!) and Sony TA-FE200 amp. The Yamaha FM/LW tuner may finally be allowed to leave the stack.

                • Wiim components are an easy recommendation. They offer tremendous bang for the buck. Delighted you’re digging yours. I use an Eversolo dmp-a6 with an external DAC hooked up to it via USB and it sounds marvellous. I still play more CDs than streams though old habits die hard I guess.

                • I don’t know if Wiim is the same as Sonos as far as playlists are concerned but I have a lot of Sonos playlists that are an amalgam of Spotify & home served files. It makes it very very hard to break free of Spotify. Make sure you don’t make the same ‘mistake’ .

        • Dai, it’s lossless up to the point it arrives at the rendering device (phone or tablet) at which point it gets mangled by the Spotify app.

          Spotify Connect should be true lossless (if your hardware supports it, but not many do) because the audio data doesn’t go through the app, the phone/tablet is used only as a controller.

          I watched a long (~30 min) Youtube video by a man with Audio Precision test rig comparing lossless streams from Spotify, Tidal and (I think) Qobuz. It was very dull, but it was nice to see an AP rig again (I have no use for one in my current role, sadly).

  2. Had a discussion the other night with around 25 expats (Brits, Swedes, Canadians, Dutch and one guy from Poland). Most were in their fifties, all listened regularly to ‘pop’ music, mostly through high-end phones streaming to pretty high-end earbuds and every single one uses Spotify. Not one had heard of Tidal or Qobuz.

  3. *waves*
    I haven’t heard Spotify’s full fat version but as Fents says it doesn’t offer “hi-res” it tops out at 24 bit / 44.1 kHz FLAC. That’s perfectly acceptable to every right thinking “normie”. Over the years streaming has been a thing I’ve tried most of the platforms, at the present time I’m using Qobuz. I switched after using Tidal for a few years for a few reasons. Qobuz Connect works better than Tidal Connect. Qobuz sounds better than any other platform I’ve tried, not by much but it is noticeable…just. Qobuz pays the most to artists.
    As usual it’s all a matter of personal taste over the various UIs of the various platforms and the other differences between them. If you want Atmos and videos then Tidal is for you. If you want spacial audio and a seperate classical app or you’d locked into the Apple ecosystem then Apple Music is the obvious choice. Spotify has become a bit of a Swiss army knife with podcasts and audio books as well as music on offer. You pays your money and takes your choice.

  4. I would but the migration process is too difficult. At least they’ve got all the Little Feat albums now. Also in various music endeavours there’s lots of sharing Spotify playlists which I’d have to keep up. It’s like Signal, much better messaging app than WhatsApp and is Meta free but hardly anyone uses it. Well, that I know.

    • But what about all the artists who aren’t Taylor Swift getting ripped off by Spotify?
      Although I have to admit I use Amazon virtually every week and we all know how awful Amazon is re exploiting small businesses, avoiding tax etc etc so someone not switching from Spotify because it’s too hard is hardly Crime of the Century….

      • The world is terrible and I can’t solve every problem but I can avoid making them for myself. And anyone can publicise their music on Spotify for almost nothing too. I don’t see many people taking their music off the platform. It’s wrong for sure of course but the music biz has always ripped off artists. Plus ça change.

        • Not one hint of criticism from me old chap – we all end up doing what we think is best. For me leaving Spotify (many moons ago) was the obvious choice but living in the middle of nowhere I would struggle to justify banning Amazon from rolling up to my gate and saying “See you next week”…

      • Given that having your music on Spotify is a voluntary decision on the part of any rights owner / artist, it’s hard to see how anyone is getting “ripped off”, and presumably why bands like Los Campesinos! are something of a rarity.

          • Possibly different for heritage acts rather than people looking to build a career. Lots of bands/artists never made any money from albums anyway, recording and promotional costs being unrecouped. Streaming is a way of keeping their catalogue available when it will never get any radio airplay.

            • Well exactly. A $20 a year subscription to Distro Kid keeps all your music on streamers. Of course you are completely at liberty to reduce that audience to family and friends who still don’t listen to it. Twang Jr’s punk album he made with a few mates a couple of years ago had over 20,000 streams and though he should have made money and didn’t he gets messages from South America asking about particular tracks so that’s enough.

              Here you are, add to that track count.

            • The heritage point is well made. back in 2024 Bonnie Tyler was bemoaning (in the Daily Mail no less) that she’d be “lucky if she got 10p” from streaming. At the end of last year Spotify said they’d paid $1.3m to the rights holders for her music for streams in 2024. So, a likely aggregate of $4m or more across all the platforms.

              Doesn’t mean she saw $4m of course. But if was only 10p I’d imagine she should be getting a new agent and having a stern word with BMG and Jim Steinman.

          • Bands are getting ripped off for sure. That’s never been in doubt, and it’s been around since the 50’s. And the primary beneficiary remains the music labels, who most thank Spotify on a daily basis for (a) saving their skins from illegal downloads and (b) being the social media hate mobs favourite pariah.

            The music industry is thought to be worth about $50bn a year, of which $10bn flows in from streaming. Universal Music Group took $12.6bn of that $50bn. Yup, 25%.

            Buried in their take was the admission that $200m was “paid out” as recoupable income to artists – so basically a loan which has to be paid back, from income such as CD sales and streaming, in line with rates agreed between the streamer and label. Industry estimates that between 70% and 90% of artists never clear what they owe. So somehow, UMG have been able to trouser over $12bn from a roster that is unlikely to see much over 1 in 4 see any return.

            I think I can see where the rip off happens.

  5. I use Tidal but I thought the issue is with the record companies in that Spotify pay them whatever and then it’s down to the contracts between them and the artists.

    • It’s both the streaming platforms and the labels. And the punters too.

      Streaming doesn’t pay remotely near what artists or writers get for radio play or movie/television use. Even the good ones like Qobuz.

      But there again, if they paid the same as radio rates, all the streamers would go bust, because the subscriptions would be too expensive.

  7. Speaking of playlists, is there any worse advert than the one for Am*z*n music which pollutes the WIYE podcasts?

    The turkey is raw and the sprouts are on fire, then some dozy offspring says “Don’t worry, I’ve made you a playlist.” It’s what infanticide was invented for.

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